Man Drinks Fake Poison After Being Convicted for Threatening to Shoot Himself in Court

Persuaded by a judge not to shoot himself at a Florida courthouse last year, a security guard distraught over a child support case was then criminally charged.

Yesterday, after being found guilty by a jury of armed trespass and reckless display of a weapon, 60-year-old Marin Stroia drank something from a large aspirin bottle and collapsed on the floor of the Broward County courtroom, reports the Sun Sentinel.

He initially told a courtroom deputy that the liquid he drank from the aspirin bottle was poison, then later said it wasn’t, the newspaper recounts.

Listed in good condition at a Fort Lauderdale hospital afterward, Stroia could get up to five years for the trespass and a year on the weapons conviction when he is sentenced at a later date.

A previous ABAJournal.com post details the action taken by Judge Joel Lazarus to talk Stroia out of shooting himself in January 2011: